At this point, Pete's wildly questionable status as a slave is finally resolved, and the rest of the film unfolds with Elliott saving the day several times over before leaving Pete to go save another troubled (possibly enslaved) kid.

Before all that happens, however, Elliott reserves one final, pointed humiliation for the Gogans. He scares Ma Gogan into falling into a vat of tar, which subsequently coats the rest of her family as they try to get her out of it.

Naturally, Pete and Elliott find the inherent cultural irony of his former slavers covered in black tar to be hysterical, because they are hip to winking meta-cultural symbolism embedded within Disney movie musicals.